Category Archives: Terror

The Post Obama Iran Report

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Former Mossad Chief explains, it is all about the Iran threat. Clearly, the Obama administration including is National Security Council and both Secretaries of State focused more on Israel and accusatory ‘occupier’ status than on Iran.

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Behzad Mesri, the Iranian national the US has accused of hacking HBO this year, is part of an elite Iranian cyber-espionage unit known in infosec circles as Charming Kitten, according to a report released yesterday by Israeli firm ClearSky Cybersecurity.

Known as an APT (Advanced Persistent Threat), this group has been active since 2013 and is believed to be operating under the protection of the local Iranian government.

The group’s activities have been first exposed in March 2014, when US cyber-security firm FireEye published a report entitled “Operation Saffron Rose.”

Charming Kitten —also tracked under various codenames such as Newscaster, NewsBeef, Flying Kitten, and the Ajax Security Team— was one of the most active Iran-based cyber-espionage units at the time, but once the FireEye report went public, the group dismantled its infrastructure and went dormant.

Subsequent research published by Iran Threats and ClearSky show that parts of the old Charming Kitten infrastructure, such as malware and credential theft resources, have been reused by another Iranian cyber-espionage unit named Rocket Kittens, and possibly more.

Various experts have pointed out that most of these groups are most likely operating under the protection and guidance of Iranian military, hence the reason why some resources are used not by one or two, but multiple APTs.

According to the official indictment, US officials said Mesri worked for the Iranian military, but that he also lived a separate life as a hacker. Evidence shows that Mesri defaced hundreds of websites and most likely carried out the HBO hack outside of his role in the Charming Kittens operations, most of which have targeted Iranian dissidents.

Mesri had connections to other Charming Kitten members

The 59-page ClearSky report released yesterday shows a web of connections between Mesri and other members of the Charming Kitten espionage unit, including connections to a hacktivist group known as the Turk Black Hat Security hacking group, where Mesri operated under the pseudonym of “Skote Vahshat,” together with other persons linked to Iranian APTs.

Besides Charming Kitten and the subsequent Rocket Kitten incarnation, Iran is home to other APT groups such as OilRig [1, 2], CopyKittens, and Magic Hound (Cobalt Gypsy, Timberworm), all very active.

In fact, Iranian actors are some of the most active groups around, albeit far from the most sophisticated. Their usual targets are businesses, human rights groups, individuals, and nearby governments of interest or at odds with the Iranian government — such as Saudi Arabian companies and government agencies, or Israeli military and government targets.

According to multiple reports, the Charming Kittens group of which Mesri is suspected of being a member, operated using mundane spear-phishing and watering hole attacks, and targeted individuals using made-up organizations and people, fake news sites, or by impersonating real companies.

The group was not sophisticated like US, Chinese, or Russian counterparts, but persisted with attacks until they got access to their targets’ email inbox and social media accounts, most likely to gather information on a person’s past or upcoming plans. More details here.

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Is Iran a cyber threat? Yes and gaining hacking abilities quickly.

Tehran poses an increasing cyber threat to the U.S., in light of the Trump administration’s allegations that Iran is violating United Nations Security Council resolutions tied to the nuclear agreement. Iran-sponsored hackers—dismissively referred to as “kittens” for their original lack of sophistication—are bolstering their cyber warfare capabilities as part of their rivalry with Saudi Arabia. But should President Donald Trump take further steps to scrap the nuclear deal, it could mean an uptick in Iranian state-sponsored cyber intrusions into American and allied systems, with the goals of espionage, subversion, sabotage and possibly coercion.

  • Since 2011, Iran has worked to establish itself as a prominent aggressor in cyberspace, alongside China, Russia and North Korea. Evolving from mere website defacement and crude censorship domestically in the early 2000s, Iran has become a player in sustained cyber espionage campaigns, disruptive denial of service (DDoS) attacks and the probing of networks for critical infrastructure facilities.
  • Iran wasn’t pursuing cyber capabilities with much urgency, experts say, until it was revealed  in 2010 that a joint Israeli-U.S. Stuxnet worm sabotaged nuclear centrifuges at Iran’s facility in Natanz. As the first-known instance of virtual intrusions resulting in physical effects, the operation demonstrated the potential effectiveness of such an attack and has informed much of Iranian cyber operations since.
  • Iran often has conducted disruptive cyber operations loosely in response to actions taken by others. It sees offensive cyber operations as an asymmetric but proportional tool for retaliation. For example, following the Stuxnet attack and the imposition of new sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial sectors in 2011, Tehran was suspected of retaliating in 2012 by releasing the Shamoon disk-wiping malware into the networks of Saudi oil giant Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s natural gas authority, RasGas. It also launched volleys of DDoS attacks against at least 46 major U.S. financial systems.
  • Iran commonly conducts its state-sponsored cyber operations behind a thin veil of hacktivism. From 2011 to 2013, a group calling itself the Qassam Cyber Fighters launched DDoS attacks that flooded the servers of U.S. banks with artificial traffic until they became inaccessible. In March 2016, the Justice Department unsealed indictments of seven individuals—employees of the Iran-based computer companies ITSecTeam and Mersad Company—for conducting the DDoS attacks — and intrusions into a small dam in upstate New York—on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the arm of Iran’s military formed in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

While much of Iran’s cyber operations have been attempts at asymmetric disruption against its Gulf rivals, Israel and the United States, it has recalculated since the 2015 negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal.

  • Under scrutiny by the international community, Iran has largely reined in disruptive attacks against the U.S., with some operations still deployed against Saudi Arabia. In November 2016, a variant of the disk-wiping malware Shamoon was deployed against Saudi aviation and transportation authorities.

Rather than relying on disruptive attacks against the West, Iran has pursued cyber-enabled information warfare against its regional competitors, namely Saudi Arabia. By utilizing cyber proxies to access and weaponize privileged information, Iran has subtly sought to undermine Saudi Arabia’s political standing in the region and in the eyes of international allies. This kind of grey-zone offensive—an act short of war—is a page right out of the Russian intelligence playbook of active measures in Europe and the U.S.

  • In April 2015, the pro-Saudi newspaper Al Hayat was hacked by a group calling itself the Yemen Cyber Army, which experts say has loose ties to Iran. The attack replaced the media outlet’s front page with threatening messages aimed at dissuading the Saudis from getting involved in the civil unrest bubbling across their southern border. The hack was followed quickly by stories on Iran’s state-run FARS news agency and Russia’s RT network, citing the Yemen Cyber Army for breaching the Saudi foreign ministry and its threats to release personal information on Saudi officials and expose diplomatic correspondence that allegedly suggested Saudi support of Islamist groups in the region. One month later, WikiLeaks published material likely taken from the trove of stolen correspondence.
  • In another example, an Iran-linked Hezbollah hacktivist group known as the Islamic Cyber Resistance leaked sensitive material related to the Saudi army, the Saudi Binladin Group and the Israeli Defense Forces, following the December 2013 assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan al-Laqis, according to Matthew McInniss, an AEI scholar now working on Iran in the Trump State Department. Ties also have been detected between Iran and the Syrian Electronic Army, the hacking wing of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, according to Cipher Brief expert and former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden.
  • The link between Iranian government support and the cyber proxy actors is difficult to prove. But it would follow the pattern of Iranian military assistance given to other types of proxy forces in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
  • The governmental structure in Iran that oversees cyber-related activities is the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, established by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in March 2012. It consists of representatives from various Iranian intelligence and security services. However, the direct command-and-control structure for engaging in cyber operations remains a mystery, particularly when it comes to cyber proxies. While it could be the responsibility of Iran’s Quds Force, the external wing of the IRGC, the lack of a clear command-and-control system could be intentional. Similar to Iran’s “mosaic defense” military structure, cyber operations appear more decentralized and fluid than other countries with advanced cyber capabilities—Russia and China, for example—complicating the tracking and attribution of attacks.

The Iranian nuclear deal may have had some cyber-deterrent value, in that it reined in Iranian disruptive attacks against the West, but this could be short-lived. Rhetoric from the Trump administration is stoking the fire, including recent statements by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley that Iran is violating the nuclear agreement.

  • Iran, as a result, is likely to engage in broad-spectrum cyber espionage to alleviate that uncertainty. For example, Operation Cleaver in 2012-14 hit U.S. military targets, as well as systems in critical industries such as energy and utilities, oil and gas, chemicals, airlines and transportation hubs, global telecommunications, healthcare, aerospace, education and the defense industrial base. Earlier this month, reports surfaced of a new Iranian state-sponsored actor—referred to as APT 34—conducting reconnaissance of critical infrastructure in the Middle East.
  • While the probing of such essential systems is alarming, it is expected as a contingency plan, should relations with adversaries escalate. The New York Times reported that the U.S. had similar plans – known as Operation Nitro Zeus – to disrupt Iranian critical services should the nuclear negotiations have gone sideways during the Obama administration. It is likely the Trump administration is devising similar contingency plans. Learn more about the contributors here.

 

Hezbollah’s Billion-Dollar Criminal Enterprise , Obama Ignored

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The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook

Politico: An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah’s billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.

Part I

A global threat emerges

How Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and traced what they believed to be the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

December 15, 2011

Hezbollah is linked to a $483,142,568 laundering scheme

The money, allegedly laundered through the Lebanese Canadian Bank and two exchange houses, involved approximately 30 U.S. car buyers.

Read the document

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise., who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The untold story of Project Cassandra illustrates the immense difficulty in mapping and countering illicit networks in an age where global terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime have merged, but also the extent to which competing agendas among government agencies — and shifting priorities at the highest levels — can set back years of progress.

And while the pursuit may be shadowed in secrecy, from Latin American luxury hotels to car parks in Africa to the banks and battlefields of the Middle East, the impact is not: In this case, multi-ton loads of cocaine entering the United States, and hundreds of millions of dollars going to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization with vast reach.

Obama had entered office in 2009 promising to improve relations with Iran as part of a broader rapprochement with the Muslim world. On the campaign trail, he had asserted repeatedly that the Bush administration’s policy of pressuring Iran to stop its illicit nuclear program wasn’t working, and that he would reach out to Tehran to reduce tensions.

The man who would become Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and then CIA director, John BrennanJohn BrennanObama’s White House counterterrorism adviser, who became CIA director in 2013., went further. He recommended in a policy paper that “the next president has the opportunity to set a new course for relations between the two countries” through not only a direct dialogue, but “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system.”

By May 2010, Brennan, then assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, confirmed in a speech that the administration was looking for ways to build up “moderate elements” within Hezbollah.

“Hezbollah is a very interesting organization,” Brennan told a Washington conference, saying it had evolved from “purely a terrorist organization” to a militia and, ultimately, a political party with representatives in the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet, according to a Reuters report.

“There is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us what they’re doing,” Brennan said. “And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements.”

In practice, the administration’s willingness to envision a new role for Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with its desire for a negotiated settlement to Iran’s nuclear program, translated into a reluctance to move aggressively against the top Hezbollah operatives, according to Project Cassandra members and others.

Lebanese arms dealer Ali FayadAli Fayad(aka Fayyad). Ukraine-based arms merchant suspected of being a Hezbollah operative moving large amounts of weapons to Syria. , a suspected top Hezbollah operative whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, was arrested in Prague in the spring of 2014. But for the nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.

Fayad, who had been indicted in U.S. courts on charges of planning the murders of U.S. government employees, attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to acquire, transfer and use anti-aircraft missiles, was ultimately sent to Beirut. He is now believed by U.S. officials to be back in business, and helping to arm militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons.

March 26, 2014

Indictment of Ali Fayad

The indictment alleges Fayad, along with his co-conspirators, agreed to provide the FARC with weapons to kill U.S. and Colombian officials.

Read the document

Project Cassandra members say administration officials also blocked or undermined their efforts to go after other top Hezbollah operatives including one nicknamed the ‘GhostThe GhostOne of the most mysterious alleged associates of Safieddine, secretly indicted by the U.S., linked to multi-ton U.S.-bound cocaine loads and weapons shipments to Middle East.,” allowing them to remain active despite being under sealed U.S. indictment for years. People familiar with his case say the Ghost has been one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers, including to the U.S., as well as a major supplier of conventional and chemical weapons for use by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his people.

And when Project Cassandra agents and other investigators sought repeatedly to investigate and prosecute Abdallah SafieddineAbdallah SafieddineHezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group’s “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking., Hezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran, whom they considered the linchpin of Hezbollah’s criminal network, the Justice Department refused, according to four former officials with direct knowledge of the cases.

The administration also rejected repeated efforts by Project Cassandra members to charge Hezbollah’s military wing as an ongoing criminal enterprise under a federal Mafia-style racketeering statute, task force members say. And they allege that administration officials declined to designate Hezbollah a “significant transnational criminal organization” and blocked other strategic initiatives that would have given the task force additional legal tools, money and manpower to fight it.

Former Obama administration officials declined to comment on individual cases, but noted that the State Department condemned the Czech decision not to hand over Fayad. Several of them, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were guided by broader policy objectives, including de-escalating the conflict with Iran, curbing its nuclear weapons program and freeing at least four American prisoners held by Tehran, and that some law enforcement efforts were undoubtedly constrained by those concerns.

But the former officials denied that they derailed any actions against Hezbollah or its Iranian allies for political reasons.

“There has been a consistent pattern of actions taken against Hezbollah, both through tough sanctions and law enforcement actions before and after the Iran deal,” said Kevin Lewis, an Obama spokesman who worked at both the White House and Justice Department in the administration.

Lewis, speaking for the Obama administration, provided a list of eight arrests and prosecutions as proof. He made special note of a February 2016 operation in which European authorities arrested an undisclosed number of alleged members of a special Hezbollah business affairs unit that the DEA says oversees its drug trafficking and other criminal money-making enterprises.

Project Cassandra officials, however, noted that the European arrests occurred after the negotiations with Iran were over, and said the task force initiated the multinational partnerships on its own, after years of seeing their cases shot down by the Justice and State departments and other U.S. agencies.

The Justice Department, they pointed out, never filed corresponding U.S. criminal charges against the suspects arrested in Europe, including one prominent Lebanese businessman formally designated by the Treasury Department for using his “direct ties to Hezbollah commercial and terrorist elements” to launder bulk shipments of illicit cash for the organization throughout Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

A former senior national security official of the Obama administration, who played a role in the Iran nuclear negotiations, suggested that Project Cassandra members were merely speculating that their cases were being blocked for political reasons. Other factors, including a lack of evidence or concerns about interfering with intelligence operations could have been in play.

“What if the CIA or the Mossad had an intelligence operation ongoing inside Hezbollah and they were trying to pursue someone . . . against whom we had impeccable [intelligence] collection and the DEA is not going to know that?” the official said. “I get the feeling people who don’t know what’s going on in the broader universe are grasping at straws.”

The official added: “The world is a lot more complicated than viewed through the narrow lens of drug trafficking. So you’re not going to let CIA rule the roost, but you’re also certainly not going to let DEA do it either. Your approach to anything as complicated as Hezbollah is going to have to involve the interagency [process], because the State Department has a piece of the pie, the intelligence community does, Treasury does, DOD does.”

Nonetheless, other sources independent of Project Cassandra confirmed many of the allegations in interviews with POLITICO, and in some cases, in public comments.

One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that “under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”

February 16, 2017

Katherine Bauer testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs

Former Treasury official criticizes the Obama administration.

Read the document

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators” arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote.

Bauer, in an interview, declined to elaborate on her testimony.

AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise., for one, said Obama administration officials expressed concerns to him about alienating Tehran before, during and after the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. This was, he said, part of an effort to “defang, defund and undermine the investigations that were involving Iran and Hezbollah,” he said.

“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”

With much fanfare, Obama announced the final agreement on implementation of the Iran deal on Jan. 17, 2016, in which Tehran promised to shelve efforts to build a nuclear weapons program in exchange for being released from crippling international economic sanctions.

Within months, task force officials said, Project Cassandra was all but dead. Some of its most senior officials, including Jack KellyJohn “Jack” KellyDEA agent overseeing Hezbollah cases at Special Operations Division, who named task force Project Cassandra after clashes with other U.S. agencies about Hezbollah drug-terror links., the veteran DEA supervisory agent who created and led the task force, were transferred to other assignments. And Asher himself left the task force long before that, after the Defense Department said his contract would not be renewed.

As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments — all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials.

The derailment of Project Cassandra also has undermined U.S. efforts to determine how much cocaine from the various Hezbollah-affiliated networks is coming into the United States, especially from Venezuela, where dozens of top civilian and military officials have been under investigation for more than a decade. Recently, the Trump administration designated the country’s vice president, a close ally of Hezbollah and of Lebanese-Syrian descent, as a global narcotics kingpin.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah — in league with Iran — continues to undermine U.S. interests in Iraq, Syria and throughout wide swaths of Latin America and Africa, including providing weapons and training to anti-American Shiite militias. And Safieddine, the Ghost and other associates continue to play central roles in the trafficking of drugs and weapons, current and former U.S. officials believe.

“They were a paramilitary organization with strategic importance in the Middle East, and we watched them become an international criminal conglomerate generating billions of dollars for the world’s most dangerous activities, including chemical and nuclear weapons programs and armies that believe America is their sworn enemy,” said Kelly, the supervisory DEA agent and lead coordinator of its Hezbollah cases.

“If they are violating U.S. statutes,” he asked, “why can’t we bring them to justice?”

May, 31, 2017

Indictment of Samer El Debek

From roughly 2008 to 2015, Debek allegedly received military training from training in surveillance, explosives and firearms.

Read the document

Kelly and Asher are among the officials involved in Project Cassandra who have been quietly contacted by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, who said a special POLITICO report April 24 on Barack Obama’s hidden Iran deal concessions raised urgent questions about the need to resurrect key law enforcement programs to counter Iran.

That won’t be easy, according to former Project Cassandra members, even with President Donald Trump’s recent vow to crack down on Iran and Hezbollah. They said they tried to keep the project on life support, in hopes that it would be revived by the next administration, but the loss of key personnel, budget cuts and dropped investigations are only a few of many challenges made worse by the passage of nearly a year since Trump took office.

“You can’t let these things disintegrate,” said Kelly. “Sources evaporate. Who knows if we can find all of the people willing to testify?”

Derek MaltzDerek MaltzSenior DEA official who as head of Special Operations Division lobbied for support for Project Cassandra and its investigations., who oversaw Project Cassandra as the head of the DEA’s Special Operations Division for nine years ending in July 2014, put it this way: “Certainly there are targets that people feel that could have been indicted and weren’t. There is certainly an argument to be made that if tomorrow all the agencies were ordered to come together and sit in a room and put all the evidence on the table against all these bad guys, that there could be a hell of a lot of indictments.”

But Maltz said the damage wrought by years of political interference will be hard to repair.

“There’s no doubt in my mind now that the focus was this Iran deal and our initiative was kind of like a fly in the soup,” Maltz said. “We were the train that went off the tracks.”

Project Cassandra had its origins in a series of investigations launched in the years after the 9/11 attacks which all led, via their own twisted paths, to Hezbollah as a suspected global criminal enterprise.

Operation TitanOperation TitanA joint investigation with Colombian authorities into a global money-laundering and drug-trafficking alliance between Latin American traffickers and Lebanese operatives., in which the DEA worked with Colombian authorities to explore a global alliance between Lebanese money launderers and Colombian drug trafficking conglomerates, was one. Operation Perseus, targeting Venezuelan syndicates, was another. At the same time, DEA agents in West Africa were investigating the suspicious flow of thousands of used cars from U.S. dealerships to car parks in Benin.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the U.S. military was probing the role of Iran in outfitting Shiite militias with high-tech improvised explosive devices known as Explosively Formed Penetrators, or EFPs, that had already killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers.

All of these paths eventually converged on Hezbollah.

This wasn’t entirely a surprise, agents say. For decades, Hezbollah — in close cooperation with Iranian intelligence and Revolutionary Guard — had worked with supporters in Lebanese communities around the world to create a web of businesses that were long suspected of being fronts for black-market trading. Along the same routes that carried frozen chicken and consumer electronics, these businesses moved weapons, laundered money and even procured parts for Iran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

As they pursued their investigations, the DEA agents found that Hezbollah was redoubling all of these efforts, working urgently to raise cash, and lots of it, to rebuild its south Lebanon stronghold after a 2006 war with Israel had reduced it to rubble.

Dating back to its inception in the early 1980s, Hezbollah, which translates to “Party of God,” had also engaged in “narcoterrorism,” collecting a tariff from drug dealers and other black-market suppliers who operated in territory it controlled in Lebanon and elsewhere. Now, based on the DEA’s extensive network of informants, undercover operatives and wiretaps, it looked like Hezbollah had shifted tactics, and gotten directly involved in the global cocaine trade, according to interviews and documents, including a confidential DEA assessment.

“It was like they flipped a switch,” Kelly told POLITICO. “All of a sudden, they reversed the flow of all of the black-market activity they had been taxing for years, and took control of the operation.”

Operating like an organized crime family, Hezbollah operatives would identify businesses that might be profitable and useful as covers for cocaine trafficking and buy financial stakes in them, Kelly and others said. “And if the business was successful and suited their current needs,” Kelly said, “they went from partial owners to majority owners to full partnership or takeover.”

Hezbollah even created a special financial unit that, translated into English, means “Business Affairs Component,” to oversee the sprawling criminal operation, and it was run by the world’s most wanted terrorist after Osama bin Laden, a notoriously vicious Hezbollah military commander named Imad MughniyehImad MughniyehA Hezbollah mastermind who oversaw its international operations and, the DEA says, its drug trafficking, as head of its military wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization., according to DEA interviews and documents.

Mughniyeh had for decades been the public face of terrorism for Americans, orchestrating the infamous attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in 1983 in their barracks in Lebanon, and dozens more Americans in attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that year and an annex the year after. When President Ronald Reagan responded to the attacks by withdrawing peacekeeping troops from Lebanon, Hezbollah claimed a major victory and vaulted to the forefront of the Islamist resistance movement against the West.

Over the next 25 years, Iran’s financial and military support for Hezbollah enabled it to amass an army with tens of thousands of foot soldiers, more heavy armaments than most nation-states and approximately 120,000 rockets and ballistic missiles that could strike Israel and U.S. interests in the region with devastating precision.

Hezbollah became an expert in soft power, as well. It provided food, medical care and other social services for starving refugees in war-torn Lebanon, winning credibility on the ground. It then evolved further into a powerful political party, casting itself as the defender of poor, mostly Shiite Lebanese against Christian and Sunni Muslim elites. But even as Hezbollah was moving into the mainstream of Lebanese politics, Mughniyeh was overseeing a secret expansion of its terrorist wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization. Working with Iranian intelligence agents, Islamic Jihad continued to attack Western, Israeli and Jewish targets around the world, and to conduct surveillance on others — including in the United States — in preparation for future attacks.

Hezbollah mostly left the United States alone, in what was clearly a strategic decision to avoid U.S. retaliation. But by 2008, the Bush administration came to believe that Islamic Jihad was the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world, capable of launching instantaneous attacks, possibly with chemical, biological or low-grade nuclear weapons, that would dwarf those on 9/11.

By funding terrorism and military operations through global drug trafficking and organized crime, Mughniyeh’s business affairs unit within Islamic Jihad had become the embodiment of the kind of threat the United States was struggling to address in the post-9/11 world.

The DEA believed that it was the logical U.S. national security agency to lead the interagency effort to go after Mughniyeh’s drug trafficking networks. But within the multipronged U.S. national security apparatus, this was both a questionable and problematic assertion.

Established by President Richard Nixon in 1973 to bring together the various anti-drug programs under the Department of Justice, the DEA was among the youngest of the U.S. national security agencies.

And while the DEA had quickly proven itself adept at working on the global stage — especially in partnerships with drug-infested countries desperate for U.S. help like Colombia — few people within the U.S. government thought of it as a legitimate counterterrorism force.

In the final years of the Bush administration, though, the DEA had won the support of top officials for taking down two major international arms dealers, a Syrian named Monzer al-Kassar and the Russian “Lord of War,” Viktor BoutViktor Anatolyevich BoutVladimir Putin’s arms dealer, known as the “Lord of War.” Convicted of conspiracy to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to Colombian narcoterrorists.. And thanks to supportive Republicans in Congress, it had become the beneficiary of a new federal law that empowered its globe-trotting cadre of assault-weapon-toting Special Operations agents.

The statute allowed DEA agents to operate virtually anywhere, without permission required from other U.S. agencies. All they needed to do was connect drug suspects to terrorism, and they could arrest them, haul them back to the United States and flip them in an effort to penetrate “the highest levels of the world’s most significant and notorious criminal organizations,” as then-Special Operations chief MaltzDerek MaltzSenior DEA official who as head of Special Operations Division lobbied for support for Project Cassandra and its investigations. told Congress in November 2011.

As they crunched the massive amounts of intel streaming into the DEA’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Operations Center in Chantilly, Virginia, the agents on Operation TitanOperation TitanA joint investigation with Colombian authorities into a global money-laundering and drug-trafficking alliance between Latin American traffickers and Lebanese operatives., Perseus and the other cases began to connect the dots and map the contours of one overarching criminal enterprise.

Part II

Everywhere and Nowhere

From its headquarters in the Middle East, Hezbollah extends its criminal reach to Latin America, Africa and the United States.

On Feb. 12, 2008, CIA and Israeli intelligence detonated a bomb in MughniyehImad MughniyehA Hezbollah mastermind who oversaw its international operations and, the DEA says, its drug trafficking, as head of its military wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization.’s car as he was leaving a celebration of the 29th anniversary of the Iranian revolution in Damascus, Syria. He was killed instantly. It was a major blow to Hezbollah, but soon after, wiretapped phone lines and other U.S. evidence showed that his criminal operation was busier than ever, and overseen by two trusted associates, according to interviews with former Project Cassandra officials and DEA documents.

One was financier Adham TabajaAdham TabajaLebanese businessman, alleged co-leader of Hezbollah Business Affairs Component and key figure directly tying Hezbollah’s commercial and terrorist activities.. The other, the interviews and documents reveal, was Safieddine, the key link between Hezbollah — which was run by his cousin, Hassan Nasrallah and his own brother Hashem — and Iran, Hezbollah’s state sponsor, which saw the group as its strategic ally in defending Shiite Muslims in the largely Sunni Muslim states that surrounded it.

Investigators were also homing in on several dozen key players underneath them who acted as “superfacilitators” for the various criminal operations benefitting Hezbollah, Iran and, at times, their allies in Iraq, Syria, Venezuela and Russia.

But it was Safieddine, a low-key, bespectacled man with a diplomatic bearing, who was their key point of connection from his base in Tehran, investigators believed.

The Colombia and Venezuela investigations linked him to numerous international drug smuggling and money laundering networks, and especially to one of the biggest the DEA had ever seen, led by Medellin-based Lebanese businessman Ayman JoumaaAyman Saied JoumaaAccused drug kingpin and financier whose vast network allegedly smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. with Mexico’s Zetas cartel and laundered money..

JoumaaAyman Saied JoumaaAccused drug kingpin and financier whose vast network allegedly smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. with Mexico’s Zetas cartel and laundered money.’s network rang alarm bells in Washington when agents discovered he was working with Mexico’s brutal Los Zetas cartel to move multi-ton loads of cocaine directly into the United States, and washing $200 million a month in criminal proceeds with the help of 300 or so used car dealerships. The network would funnel huge amounts of money to the dealerships to purchase used cars, which would then be shipped to Benin, on Africa’s west coast.

Arctic Ocean

U.S.

Mexico

Drugs from Colombia and Venezuela shipped to U.S. via Mexico

Freshly laundered money is returned to U.S. to buy used cars

Pro-Hezbollah money, houses and banks, Beirut Drugs flow to Europe, Benin

Used cars bought in U.S., shipped to West Africa for resale

Used car proceeds couriered to Lebanon Indian Ocean

Drugs are sent from Colombia and Venezuela to Europe via West Africa Antarctica

As the task force investigators intensified their focus on Safieddine, they were contacted out of the blue by AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise., the Defense Department official, who was at Special Operations Command tracking the money used to provide ragtag Iraqi Shiite militias with sophisticated weapons for use against U.S. troops, including the new and lethal IED known as the “Explosively Formed Penetrator.” The armor-piercing charges were so powerful that they were ripping M1 Abrams tanks in half.

“Nobody had seen weapons like these,” Asher told POLITICO. “They could blow the side off a building.”

Asher’s curiosity had been piqued by evidence linking the IED network to phone numbers intercepted in the Colombia investigation. Before long, he traced the unusual alliance to a number allegedly used by Safieddine in Iran.

“I had no clue who he was,” Asher recalled. “But this guy was sending money into Iraq, to kill American soldiers.”

“I had no clue who he was. But this guy was sending money into Iraq, to kill American soldiers.”

— David Asher on Abdallah Safieddine.

Thanks to that chance connection, the Pentagon’s then-head of counternarcotics, William Wechsler, lent Asher and a few other Defense Department experts in tracking illicit money to the DEA to see what they might find.

It was a fruitful partnership. Asher was accustomed to toiling in the financial shadows. During his 20-plus years of U.S. government work, his core expertise was in exposing money laundering and schemes to avoid financial sanctions by rogue nation states, terrorist groups, organized-crime cartels and weapons proliferation networks.

Usually, his work was strictly classified. For Project Cassandra, however, he got special dispensation from the Pentagon to build networks of unclassified information so it could be used in criminal prosecutions.

Asher and his team quickly integrated cutting-edge financial intelligence tools into the various DEA investigations. With the U.S. military’s help, agents translated thousands of hours of intercepted phone conversations from Colombia in Arabic that no one had considered relevant until the Hezbollah links appeared.

When the translations were complete, investigators said, they painted a picture of SafieddineAbdallah SafieddineHezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group’s “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking. as a human hub of a criminal enterprise with spokes emanating from Tehran outward into Latin America, Africa, Europe and the United States via hundreds of legitimate businesses and front companies.

Safieddine did not respond to requests for comment through various intermediaries including Hezbollah’s media arm. A Hezbollah official, however, denied that the organization was involved in drug dealing.

“Sheik Nasrallah has confirmed lots of times that it is not permitted religiously for Hezbollah members to be trafficking drugs,” the official said. “It is something that is preventable, in that we in Islam have things like halal [permitted] and haram [prohibited]. For us, this is haram. So in no way is it possible to be done.”

The accusation that Hezbollah is involved in drug trafficking, the representative said, “is part of the campaign to distort the image of Hezbollah as a resistance movement against the Israelis. Of course, it is possible to have Lebanese people involved in drugs, but it is not possible for them to be members of Hezbollah. This is absolutely not possible.”

Asked about Safieddine’s role in the organization, the official said, “We don’t usually expose the roles everyone plays because it is a jihadi organization. So it is a little bit secret.”

Safieddine’s cousin Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, has publicly rejected the idea that Hezbollah needs to raise money at all, through drugs or any other criminal activity, because Iran provides whatever funds it needs.

Safieddine himself, however, suggested otherwise in 2005, when he defiantly refuted the Bush administration’s accusations that Iran and Syria supplied Hezbollah with weapons. Those countries provided “political and moral” support only, he told Agence France-Presse. “We don’t need to arm ourselves from Tehran. Why bring weapons from Iran via Syria when we can procure them anywhere in the world?”

“We don’t need to arm ourselves from Tehran. Why bring weapons from Iran via Syria when we can procure them anywhere in the world?”

— Abdallah Safieddine to Agence France-Presse in 2005.

Safieddine may have been right. Agents found evidence that weapons were flowing to Hezbollah from many channels, including networks that trafficked in both drugs and weapons. And using the same trafficking networks that hummed with drugs, cash and commercial products, agents concluded, Safieddine was overseeing Hezbollah efforts to help Iran procure parts and technology for its clandestine nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

“Hezbollah operates like the Gambino crime family on steroids, and he is its John Gotti,” said Kelly, referring to the infamous “Teflon Don” crime boss who for decades eluded justice. “Whatever Iran needs, Safieddine is in charge of getting it for them.”

“Hezbollah operates like the Gambino crime family on steroids, and he is its John Gotti.”

— Jack Kelly on Abdallah Safieddine.

The Bush administration had made disrupting the networks through which Iran obtained parts for its weapons of mass destruction programs a top priority, with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Juan Zarate personally overseeing an interagency effort to map out the procurement channels. A former Justice Department prosecutor, Zarate understood the value of international law enforcement operations, and put DEA’s Special Operations Division at the center of it.

But even then, other agencies were chafing at the DEA’s role.

A Series of Roadblocks

Much of the early turbulence stemmed from an escalating turf battle between federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies over which ones had primacy in the global war on terrorism, especially over a so-called hybrid target like Hezbollah, which was both a criminal enterprise and a national security threat.

The “cops” from the FBI and DEA wanted to build criminal cases, throw Hezbollah operatives in prison and get them to turn on each other. That stoked resentment among the “spooks” at the CIA and National Security Agency, who for 25 years had gathered intelligence, sometimes through the painstaking process of having agents infiltrate Hezbollah, and then occasionally launching assassinations and cyberattacks to block imminent threats.

Further complicating the picture was the role of the State Department, which often wanted to quash both law-enforcement actions and covert operations due to the political backlash they created. Hezbollah, after all, was a leading political force in Lebanon and a provider of human services, with a sincere grass-roots following that wasn’t necessarily aware of its unsavory actions. Nowhere was the tension between law enforcement and diplomacy more acute than in dealings with Hezbollah, which was fast becoming a key part of the Lebanese government.

Distrust among U.S. agencies exploded after two incidents brought the cops-spooks divide into clear relief.

In the waning days of the Bush administration, a DEA agent’s cover was blown just as he was about to become a Colombian cartel’s main cocaine supplier to the Middle East — and to Hezbollah operatives.

A year later, under Obama, the State Department blocked an FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force from luring a key eyewitness from Beirut to Philadelphia so he could be arrested and turned against SafieddineAbdallah SafieddineHezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group’s “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking. and other Hezbollah operatives in a scheme to procure 1,200 Colt M4 military-grade assault rifles.

In both cases, law enforcement agents suspected that Middle East-based spies in the CIA had torpedoed their investigations to protect their politically sensitive and complicated relationship with Hezbollah.

The CIA declined to comment on the allegation that it intentionally blew the cover of a DEA agent or any other aspect of its relationship with Project Cassandra. The Obama State Department and Justice Department also declined to comment in response to detailed requests about their dealings with Hezbollah.

But the tensions between those agencies and the DEA were no secret. Some current and former diplomats and CIA officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, portrayed DEA Special Operations agents as undisciplined and overly aggressive cowboys with little regard for the larger geopolitical picture. “They’d come in hot to places like Beirut, want to slap handcuffs on people and disrupt operations we’d been cultivating for years,” one former CIA case officer said.

“They’d come in hot to places like Beirut, want to slap handcuffs on people and disrupt operations we’d been cultivating for years.”

— Former CIA case officer on how the DEA operated.

KellyJohn “Jack” KellyDEA agent overseeing Hezbollah cases at Special Operations Division, who named task force Project Cassandra after clashes with other U.S. agencies about Hezbollah drug-terror links. and other agents embraced their swashbuckling reputation, claiming that more aggressive tactics were needed because the CIA had long turned a blind eye to Hezbollah’s criminal networks, and even cultivated informants within them, in a misguided and myopic focus on preventing terrorist attacks.

The unyielding posture of Kelly, AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise. and their team also rankled some of their fellow law-enforcement agents within the FBI, the Justice Department and even the DEA itself. The more Kelly and Asher insisted that everyone else was missing the drug-crime-terror nexus, the more others accused them — and their team out at Chantilly — of inflating those connections to expand the task force’s portfolio, get more funding and establish its importance.

After a few years of working together on the Hezbollah cases, Kelly and Asher had become a familiar sight in the never-ending circuit of meetings and briefings in what is known as the “interagency process,” a euphemism for the U.S. national security community’s efforts to bring all elements of power to bear on a particular problem.

From outward appearances, the two made an unusual pair.

Kelly, now 51, was a streetwise agent from small-town New Jersey who cut his teeth investigating the Mafia and drug kingpins. He spent his infrequent downtime lifting weights, watching college football and chilling in cargo shorts.

Asher, 49, speaks fluent Japanese, earned his Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford University and has the pallor of a senior government official who has spent the past three decades in policy meetings, classified military war rooms and diplomatic summits.

Both were described by supporters and detractors alike as having a similarly formidable combination of investigative and analytical skills, and the self-confidence to match it. At times, and especially on Project Cassandra, their intensity worked to the detriment of their careers.

“It got to the point where a lot of people didn’t want to have meetings with them,” said one FBI terrorism task force supervisor who worked often with the two. “They refused to accept no for an answer. And they were often given no for an answer. Even though they were usually right.”

Proof of Iranian Missiles Launched by Houthis in Yemen

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Primer:

Reuters reported in 2016:

U.S. Navy ships in the Arabian Sea intercepted and seized an arms shipment from Iran likely bound for Houthi fighters in Yemen, the military said in a statement on Monday.

The weapons seized last week by the warships Sirocco and Gravely were hidden on a small dhow and included 1,500 AK-47 rifles, 200 rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers, and 21 .50-caliber machine guns, according to the Navy statement.

The weapons were seized on March 28 and are now in U.S. custody. The boat, which the Navy described as stateless, and its crew were allowed to leave once the weapons were taken.

“This seizure is the latest in a string of illicit weapons shipments assessed by the U.S. to have originated in Iran that were seized in the region by naval forces,” the military said in the statement.

It cited a Feb. 27 incident in which the Australian Navy intercepted a dhow in late February and confiscated nearly 2,000 AK-47s, 100 RPG launchers, and other weapons. On March 20, a French destroyer seized almost 2,000 AK-47s, dozens of Dragunov sniper rifles, nine antitank missiles, and other equipment.

Houthi forces seized Yemen’s capital Sanaa in 2014, stoking concern in Saudi Arabia that Iran was exploiting turmoil in the region and extending its influence to the Saudi border. The Houthis, whose home territory is in northern Yemen, practice Shi‘ite Islam, the majority faith in Iran.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Monday that Iran’s support for the Houthis is an example of its “destabilizing activities” in the region, and that the weapons shipment could be raised at the United Nations Security Council.

“We obviously are concerned about this development, because offering up support to the rebels in Yemen is something that is not at all consistent with U.N. Security Council resolutions,” Earnest said.

U.S. officials have said in the past that Iran’s direct involvement with the Houthis is limited, but that Iranian military personnel were training and equipping Houthi units.

A Saudi-led Arab coalition has been fighting to restore Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power since last year, including via air strikes on Sanaa.

U.N.-sponsored peace talks are scheduled to start in Kuwait on April 18.

The two sides have confirmed a truce starting at midnight on April 10 ahead of the peace talks, scheduled to follow a week later.

Image result for houthis yemen warships photo

WATCH: Amb. Haley Says U.N. Report Shows that Iran is “Arsonist” in Middle East

Contrary to assertions made by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that his nation is “[putting] out fires” in the Middle East in an op-ed published earlier this week, a recent United Nations report shows that Iran is the “arsonist” in the region, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said at a press conference on Thursday.

Citing President Donald Trump’s October speech in which he outlined a strategy for confronting all threats posed by Iran, Haley said, “We’re also taking a hard look at Iran’s ballistic missile program, its arms exports, and its support for terrorists, proxy fighters, and dictators.” She added that the administration was prompted to do so because since the nuclear deal the “Iranian regime’s behavior is growing worse.”

Haley described a recently-released report from the United Nations Secretary General detailing Iran’s compliance “or noncompliance” with UN Security Council resolution 2231, which implements the nuclear deal, as describing “violation after violation of weapons transfers and ballistic missile activity” by Iran.

“The United States and our partners,” Haley said, “went to great lengths to support the UN investigations into Iranian violations by declassifying evidence so that the world could better be informed of the extent of Iran’s malign activities.” She spoke of a warehouse full of recovered weapons from attacks and thanked Secretary of Defense James Mattis for making them available.

Haley pointed to the remains of a missile that had been “used to attack an international civilian airport in a G-20 country,” referring to last months attempted attack on Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid International Airport.

“Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles Airport or JFK, or the airports in Paris, London, or Berlin,” Haley said, adding, “That’s what we’re talking about here. That’s what Iran is actively supporting.”

She then explained that the missile — a short-range ballistic missile — had no stabilizer fins but had nine valves, which are “are essentially Iranian missile fingerprints.”

Haley spoke of other weapons that had been recovered and called on the international community to “join us in a united front resisting this global threat.”

This past August Reuters reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had stepped up its arms smuggling to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. One source told the news agency, “No activity goes ahead in the Gulf without the IRGC being involved. This activity involves a huge amount of money as well as transferring equipment to Iranian-backed groups in their fight against their enemies.”

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*** John Kerry knew it…

Missile Threat

Houthi forces, after raiding Yemeni government military bases over the past few years, have acquired a stockpile of possibly more than 60 missiles and rockets.[1] Short-range tactical ballistic missiles, including the Soviet Scud-B and C, North Korean Hwasong 5 and 6, the Soviet Tochka – as well as rockets – continue to be launched from Yemen(link) into Saudi Arabia – a key U.S. ally in the Middle East.[2] Houthi forces also appear to have taken Soviet SA-2 SAM missiles and re-worked them as effective anti-ground targets, dubbing the new missile “Qaher-1.”[3] Recently, reports indicate that Houthis have acquired Iranian Zelzal-3 missiles which they have begun firing into Saudi Arabia.[4]

Yemeni security forces purchased many of these missiles in the 1990s and early 2000s from North Korea before Houthi rebels seized them in the past few years.[5] As such the proliferation threat comes not from official Yemeni security forces, but from Houthi insurgents and their alleged sponsors – Iran and Hezbollah – who have seized power amid the chaos of Yemen’s plunge into civil war. Secretary of State John Kerry has come forward with intelligence indicating Iranian support for Houthi forces, but both Houthi officials and Tehran dispute this.[6] The exact capabilities of Houthi insurgents are mostly unknown, yet, the proliferation of ballistic missiles to non-state actors operating in Yemen is widely evident, and continues to pose a threat.

Current Developments

Saudi missile defense systems in conjunction with preventative coalition air strikes against missile stockpiles have proved effective at negating the Houthi missile threat: Saudi Patriot Pac-2 and Pac-3 missile placements have shot down incoming Yemeni missiles with a nearly 100% success rate.[7] However, despite the success of Saudi Arabian missile defense systems, ballistic missiles continue to proliferate to dangerous actors in Yemen and remain a threat to Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region.

In October 2016, Houthi rebels launched numerous anti-ship cruise missiles at vessels operating off the coast of Yemen. Targeted in the attacks were ships operated by the United States and the United Arab Emirates. Houthis, armed with anti-ship cruise missiles, first fired at a transport vessel operated by the UAE. The vessel was severely damaged in the attack, and damage to the ship indicated that the Houthis used a Chinese-made C-802 anti-ship cruise missile.

A week later, the USS Mason (DDG-87), a U.S. Arleigh-Burke class guided missile destroyer, was attacked with a salvo of anti-ship cruise missiles fired by the Houthis. Using Standard Missile-2 and Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile interceptors, the USS Mason was able to defuse the incoming attack. The USS Mason was attacked again several times that month, each time using defense measures to thwart Houthi anti-ship cruise missiles.

History

Houthis – officially “Ansar Allah” – are a Yemeni rebel group adherent to Zaidism: a branch of Shia Islam shared by 30-40% of the Yemeni population. Zaidi Imams ruled Yemen for 1,000 years until the 1962 revolution.[8] The new Yemeni government excluded Zaidi regions from the economic and political development southern Yemen experienced.[9] In the past few years, the Houthis have stormed to power in north and west Yemen, pushing out government forces and prompting a war with the Saudi Arabian-led coalition.

In the early 1990s, marginalization, Wahhabi influence, endemic poverty, corruption and Saudi Arabian interference all stoked opposition movements in north Yemen. Here, the al-Houthi family – for whom the movement is named – began a “Zaidi revival” in Saada in northern Yemen. Aided by Iran and the recently formed Hezbollah the Houthi movement grew rapidly.[10]

Following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the al-Houthi followers began radicalizing, threatening government control. Tensions exploded in 2004 into an armed insurgency as the militant arm of the Houthi movement – led by Hussein al-Houthi – clashed with government “Islah” forces led by President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Although Hussein was killed shortly after by government forces his family led a continuous series of insurgencies against Saleh’s government over the next 6 years.[11]

Emboldened by the success of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, Houthi rebels participated in widespread pro-democracy protests and rebellion against President Saleh in 2011. During this offensive they began taking control of Yemeni military bases and their missile arsenals. In 2012 Saleh vacated the presidency, passing it to his Vice President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The National Dialogue Conference (NDC) created to establish democracy after the 2011 revolution promised representation for the Houthis, but Hadi/GCC-drafted deal essentially ignored this, instead gerrymandering the country to eliminate Houthi power.[12]

Since 2014, Houthi forces allied with a returned Saleh and his supporters who splintered from the military, stormed through Yemen, and took control of the capital and much of western and northern Yemen. They have established a rival government to administer their territories, and pushed Hadi’s forces to refuge in the South, while Hadi himself fled to Saudi Arabia. Since mid-2015, in the face of blockades and strikes from the Saudi coalition – combined with ISIS attacks – that have killed over 2,200 children and pushed millions to starvation, Houthi support has swelled to approximately 100,000 fighters and the group continues its missile and rocket campaigns against Saudi coalition forces.[13]

References, click here.

Meet Omar Mohammed of Mosul, Iraq

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One cannot know such bravery, such vision and such atrocity in a lifetime.

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AP: The historian carried secrets too heavy for one man to bear.

He packed his bag with his most treasured possessions before going to bed: the 1 terabyte hard drive with his evidence against the Islamic State group, an orange notebook half-filled with notes on Ottoman history, and, a keepsake, the first book from Amazon delivered to Mosul.

He passed the night in despair, imagining all the ways he could die, and the moment he would leave his mother and his city.

He had spent nearly his entire life in this home, with his five brothers and five sisters. He woke his mother in her bedroom on the ground floor.

“I am leaving,” he said. “Where?” she asked. “I am leaving,” was all he could say. He couldn’t endanger her by telling her anything more. In truth, since the IS had invaded his city, he’d lived a life about which she was totally unaware.

He felt her eyes on the back of his neck, and headed to the waiting Chevrolet. He didn’t look back.

Related reading: Execution site discovered near Mosul’s Old City

HRW warns of a resurgence of violence if no one is held to account over reports of torture [Reuters] photo

For nearly two years, he’d wandered the streets of occupied Mosul, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by IS. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and deaths by stoning, so he could hear the killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.

He wasn’t a spy. He was an undercover historian and blogger . As IS turned the Iraqi city he loved into a fundamentalist bastion, he decided he would show the world how the extremists had distorted its true nature, how they were trying to rewrite the past and forge a brutal Sunni-only future for a city that had once welcomed many faiths.

He knew that if he was caught he too would be killed.

“I am writing this for the history , because I know this will end. People will return, life will go back to normal,” is how he explained the blog that was his conduit to the citizens of Mosul and the world beyond. “After many years, there will be people who will study what happened. The city deserves to have something written to defend the city and tell the truth, because they say that when the war begins, the first victim is the truth.”

He called himself Mosul Eye . He made a promise to himself in those first few days: Trust no one, document everything.

Neither family, friends nor the Islamic State group could identify him. His readership grew by the thousands every month.

And now, he was running for his life.

But it would mean passing through one Islamic State checkpoint after another, on the odds that the extremists wouldn’t stop him, wouldn’t find the hard drive that contained evidence of IS atrocities, the names of its collaborators and fighters, and all the evidence that its bearer was the man they’d been trying to silence since they first swept in.

The weight of months and years of anonymity were crushing him.

He missed his name.

___

From the beginning, Mosul Eye wrote simultaneously as a witness and a historian. Born in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war in 1986, he had come of age during a second war, when Saddam Hussein fell and the Americans took over. At 17, he remembers going to a meeting of extremists at the mosque and hearing them talk about fighting the crusaders. “I should be honest, I didn’t understand.”

As for the Americans, whose language he already spoke haltingly, he couldn’t fathom why they would come all the way from the United States to Mosul. He thought studying history would give him the answers.

The men in black came from the north, cutting across his neighborhood in brand new trucks, the best all-terrain Toyotas money could buy. He had seen jihadis before in Mosul and at first figured these men would fade away like the rest. But in the midst of pitched fighting, the extremists found the time to run down about 70 assassination targets and kill them all, hanging enormous banners announcing their arrival in June 2014.

By then a newly minted teacher, the historian attended a staff meeting at Mosul University, where the conquerors explained the Islamic State education system, how all classes would be based upon the strictest interpretation of the Quran. To a man who had been accused of secularism during his master’s thesis defense just the year before, it felt like the end of his career.

In those first few days, he wrote observations about IS, also known by the acronym ISIS, on his personal Facebook page — until a friend warned that he risked being killed. With the smell of battle still in the air, he wandered the streets, puzzling over its transformation into a city at war. He returned to find his family weeping. The smell of smoke and gunfire permeated the home.

On June 18, 2014, a week after the city fell, Mosul Eye was born .

“My job as a historian requires an unbiased approach which I am going to adhere to and keep my personal opinion to myself,” he wrote. “I will only communicate the facts I see.”

By day, he chatted with Islamic State fighters and vendors, and observed. Always observed. By night, he wrote in his native Arabic and fluent English on a WordPress blog and later on Facebook and Twitter.

The city turned dark, and Mosul Eye became one of the outside world’s main sources of news about the Islamic State fighters, their atrocities and their transformation of the city into a grotesque shadow of itself. The things IS wanted kept secret went to the heart of its brutal rule.

“They were organized as a killing machine. They are thirsty (for) blood and money and women.”

He attended Friday sermons with feigned enthusiasm. He collected and posted propaganda leaflets, including one on July 27, 2014, that claimed the Islamic State leader was a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter. Back home, writing on his blog in his other, secret identity, he decried the leaflet as a blatant attempt “to distort history” to justify the fanatics’ actions.

He drank glass after glass of tea at the hospital, talking to people who worked there. Much of the information he collected went up online. Other details he kept in his computer, for fear they would give away his identity. Someday, he told himself, he would write Mosul’s history using these documents.

The most sensitive information initially came from two old friends: one a doctor and the other a high school dropout who embraced the Islamic State’s extreme interpretation of religion. He was a taxi driver who like many others in Mosul had been detained by a Shiite militia in 2008 and still burned with resentment. He swiftly joined an intelligence unit in Mosul, becoming “one of the monsters of ISIS” — and couldn’t resist bragging about his insider knowledge.

Once he corroborated the details and masked the sources, Mosul Eye put it out for the world to see. He sometimes included photos of the fighters and commanders, complete with biographies pieced together over days of surreptitious gathering of bits and pieces of information during the course of his normal life — that of an out-of-work scholar living at home with his family.

“I used the two characters, the two personalities to serve each other,” he said. He would chat up market vendors and bored checkpoint guards for new leads.

He took on other identities as well on Facebook. Although the names were clearly fake, the characters started to take on a life of their own. One was named Mouris Milton whom he came to believe was an even better version of himself — funny, knowledgeable. Another was Ibn al-Athir al-Mawsilli, a coldly logical historian.

International media picked up on Mosul Eye from the first days, starting with an online question-and-answer with a German newspaper. The anonymous writer gave periodic written interviews in English over the years. Sometimes, journalists quoted his blog and called it an interview. In October 2016, he spoke by phone with the New Yorker for a profile but still kept his identity masked.

Intelligence agencies made contact as well and he rebuffed them each time.

“I am not a spy or a journalist,” he would say. “I tell them this: If you want the information, it’s published and it’s public for free. Take it.”

First the Islamic State group compiled lists of women accused of prostitution, he said, stoning or shooting around 500 in the initial months. Then it went after men accused of being gay, flinging them off tall buildings. Shiites, Christians and Yazidis fled from a city once proud of its multiple religions.

When the only Mosul residents left were fellow Sunnis, they too were not spared, according to the catalog of horrors that is Mosul Eye’s daily report. He detailed the deaths and whippings, for spying and apostasy, for failing to attend prayers, for overdue taxes. The blog attracted the attention of the fanatics, who posted death threats in the comments section.

___

Less than a year into their rule, in March 2015, he nearly cracked. IS beheaded a 14-year-old in front of a crowd; 12 people were arrested for selling and smoking cigarettes, and some of them flogged publicly. Seeing few alternatives, young men from Mosul were joining up by the dozens.

The sight of a fanatic severing the hand of a child accused of stealing unmoored him. The man told the boy that his hand was a gift of repentance to God before serenely slicing it away.

It was too much.

Mosul Eye was done. He defied the dress requirements, cut his hair short, shaved his beard and pulled on a bright red crewneck sweater. He persuaded his closest friend to join him.

“I decided to die.”

The sun shining, they drove to the banks of the Tigris blasting forbidden music from the car. They spread a scrap of rug over a stone outcropping and shared a carafe of tea. Mosul Eye lit a cigarette, heedless of a handful of other people picnicking nearby.

“I was so tired of worrying about myself, my family, my brothers. I am not alive to worry, but I am alive to live this life. I thought: I am done.”

He planned it as a sort of last supper, a final joyful day to end all days. He assumed he would be spotted, arrested, tortured. The tea was the best he had ever tasted.

Somehow, incredibly, his crimes went unnoticed.

He went home.

“At that moment I felt like I was given a new life.”

He grew out his hair and beard again, put the shortened trousers back on. And, for the remainder of his time in Mosul, smoked and listened to music in his room with the curtains drawn and the lights off. His computer screen and the tip of his cigarette glowed as he wrote in the dark.

The next month, he slipped up.

His friend the ex-taxi driver told him about an airstrike that had just killed multiple high-level Islamic State commanders, destroying a giant weapons cache. Elated, Mosul Eye dashed home to post it online. He hit “publish” and then, minutes later, realized his mistake. The information could have come from only one person. He trashed the post and spent a sleepless night.

“It’s like a death game and one mistake could finish your life.”

For a week, he went dark. Then he invited his friend to meet at a restaurant. They ate spicy chicken, an unemployed teacher and the gun-toting ex-taxi driver talking again about their city and their lives. His cover was not blown.

The historian went back online. Alongside the blog, he kept meticulous records — information too dangerous to share.

His computer hard drive filled with death, filed according to date, cause of death, perpetrator, neighborhood and ethnicity. Accompanying each spreadsheet entry was a separate file with observations from each day.

“IS is forcing abortions and tubal ligation surgeries on Yazidi women,” he wrote in unpublished notes from January 2015. A doctor told him there had been between 50 and 60 forced abortions and a dozen Yazidi girls younger than 15 died of injuries from repeated rapes.

April 19, 2015: “The forensics department received the bodies of 23 IS militants killed in Baiji. They had no shrapnel, no bullets, no explosives and the cause of death does not seem to be explosion. It is like nothing happened to the bodies. A medical source believes they were exposed to poison gas.”

July 7, 2015: “43 citizens were executed in different places, this time by gunfire, which is unusual because they were previously beheadings. A source inside IS said that 13 of those who were executed are fighters and they tried to flee.”

He noted a flurry of security on days when the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, seemed to be in town.

Many in Iraq, especially those who supported the Shiite-dominated leadership in Baghdad, blamed Mosul for its own fate. Mosul Eye freely acknowledged that some residents at first believed the new conquerors could only be an improvement over the heavy-handed government and the soldiers who fled with hardly a backward glance at the city they were supposed to defend.

But he also wrote publicly and privately of the suffering among citizens who refused to join the group. He was fighting on two fronts: “One against ISIS, and the other against the rumors. Trying to protect the face of Mosul, the soul of Mosul.”

He tested out different voices, implying one day that he was Christian, another that he was Muslim. Sometimes he indicated he was gone, other times that he was still in the city. “I couldn’t trust anyone,” he said.

In his mind, he left Mosul a thousand times, but always found reasons to stay: his mother, his nieces and nephews, his mission.

But finally, he had to go.

“I had to run away with the proof that will protect Mosul for years to come, and to at least be loyal to the people who were killed in the city.”

And he did not want to become another casualty of the monsters.

“I think I deserve life, deserve to be alive.”

A smuggler, persuaded by $1,000 and the assurances of a mutual acquaintance, agreed to get him out. He was leaving the next day. Mosul Eye had no time to reflect, no time to change his mind.

He returned home and began transferring the contents of his computer to the hard drive. He pulled out the orange notebook with the hand-drawn map of Mosul on the cover and the outlines of what he hoped would one day be his doctoral dissertation. Into the bag went “Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca,” an obscure American satirical novel from 1770 that he had ordered from Amazon via a new shop that was the only place in town to order from abroad online.

It was time to leave.

He wanted to make sure his mother would never have to watch the capture and killing of Mosul Eye.

On Dec. 15, 2015 he left Mosul, driving with the smuggler to the outskirts of Raqqa, a pickup point that alarmed him. From there he and other Iraqis and Syrians were picked up by a second set of smugglers and driven by convoy to Turkey.

They had no trouble crossing the border.

__

In Turkey, Mosul Eye kept at it: via WhatsApp and Viber, from Facebook messages and long conversations with friends and relatives who had contacts within IS. From hundreds of kilometers away, his life remained consumed by events in Mosul.

By mid-2016, deaths were piling up faster than he could document. The IS and airstrikes were taking a bloody toll on residents. His records grew haphazard, and he turned to Twitter to document the atrocities. In February 2017, he received asylum in Europe with the aid of an organization that learned his backstory. He continued to track the airstrikes and Islamic State killings

He mapped the airstrikes as they closed in on his family, pleading with his older brother to leave his home in West Mosul. Ahmed, 36, died days later when shrapnel from a mortar strike pierced his heart, leaving behind four young children.

It was only then that Mosul Eye revealed his secret to a younger brother — who was proud to learn the anonymous historian he had been reading for so long was his brother.

“People in Mosul had lost hope and confidence in politicians, in everything,” his brother said. Mosul Eye “managed to show that it’s possible to change the situation in the city and bring it back to life.”

As the Old City crumbled, Mosul Eye sent coordinates and phone numbers for homes filled with civilians to a BBC journalist who was covering the battle, trying to get the attention of someone in the coalition command. He believes he saved lives.

Then, with his beloved Old City destroyed, Mosul Eye launched a fundraiser to rebuild the city’s libraries because the extremists had burned all the books. None of his volunteers knew his identity.

An activist who helped co-found a “Women of Mosul” Facebook group with Mosul Eye describes him as a “spiritual leader” for the city’s secular-minded.

“He was telling us about the day-to-day events under ISIS and we were following closely with excitement as if we were watching a movie. Sometimes he went through hard times and we used to encourage him. He won the people’s trust and we became very curious to know his real personality,” said the activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she believed she was still in danger.

From a distance, finally writing his dissertation on 19th century Mosul history in the safety of a European city, he continued to write as Mosul Eye and organize cultural events and fundraisers from afar — even after Mosul was liberated.

The double life consumed him, sapped energy he’d rather use for the doctoral dissertation and for helping Mosul rebuild. And it hurt when someone asked the young Iraqi why he didn’t do more to help his people. He desperately wanted his mother to know all that he had done.

He felt barely real, with so many people knowing him by false identities: 293,000 followers on Facebook, 37,000 on WordPress and 23,400 on Twitter.

In hours of face-to-face conversations with The Associated Press over the course of two months, he agonized over when and how to end the anonymity that plagued him. He did not want to be a virtual character anymore.

On Nov. 15, 2017, Mosul Eye made his decision.

“I can’t be anonymous anymore. This is to say that I defeated ISIS. You can see me now, and you can know me now.”

He is 31 years old.

His name is Omar Mohammed.

“I am a scholar.”

Trump at War with Islam due to his Position on Jerusalem?

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So, after the declaration by President Trump announcing that Jerusalem is the historical capitol of Israel, protests continue against the West. Truth be told, at least three previous presidents all made the same declarations. A peace deal with the Palestinians is a fool’s errand.

We are to believe that President Trump is not sensitive to the disputes, history and territory? C’mon really?

*** Check out this judge’s decision as a primer:

Gothenburg, December 12 – A magistrate in this Scandinavian city has ruled that the perpetrators of two Molotov cocktail attacks against Jewish houses of worship in the last three days may not be prosecuted under criminal law, as they were exercising their legal right to freedom of expression.

Judge Lars Ferwerds ordered fourteen men detained Saturday and Monday for the firebomb attack be released immediately and the charges against them dropped this morning, and criticized the police for infringing on the men’s rights. The group had participated in assaults on synagogues to protest US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The attack forced dozens of Jews inside one of the the buildings to seek shelter in the basement as they awaited rescue.

“Shame on the police for limiting freedom of expression,” pronounced the judge. “European civilization has advanced to the point where vehement disagreement is now treated as a legitimate position, not to be repressed.”

Lawyers for the defendants praised the judge’s decision. “It has long been recognized that Muslim anger may not be restrained by law enforcement,” stated a pleased Dimi Svensen, who represents four of those arrested. “This is especially the case when the anger is directed merely at Jews. The Court was correct in admonishing the police that the antisemitism is even more venerable and sacrosanct than all other notions in European legal tradition.”

***

On Saturday, December 9, masked men threw firebombs at a synagogue in Gothenburg, Sweden. The attack took place shortly after 10:00 pm, at a time when about thirty children and teenagers were attending a party at the Jewish Center adjoining the main building. When the assault began, the guards rushed them into the cellar, and finally allowed them to go home at about 11:30 pm. (Guards, of course, are a fixture at European synagogues these days.) A mother of one of the girls at the party received a text message from her daughter saying that she was scared and that there was a smell of gasoline. More here.

Image result for gothenburg jewish houses of worship bombed photo

So, a previous policyholder with the term of GW Bush and Barack Obama, Farah Pandith, takes the position that under Trump, America is at war with Islam.

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Pandith was the first person to hold the position of Special Representative to Muslim Communities for the US State Department under Secretary Clinton. Perhaps she is cool with that judge’s decision huh?

But hold on….check out what Saudi Arabia just did…

TEHRAN (FNA)– Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman has laid increasing pressure on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to give up his quest for the Palestinian refugees’ right of return and for making Quds the capital of a Palestinian state, an Arab media outlet disclosed.

“Bin Salman has told Mahmoud Abbas to forget about the Quds case and the refugees’ right to return to their country and start a bid to establish a state in Gaza,” the Arabic-language al-Arabi al-Jadid news website reported on Tuesday, adding that the de facto ruler has promised “Abbas huge financial aid in return”.

To get rid of the difficult conditions prevailing over the meeting with the Saudi crown prince, Abbas has asked bin Salman to present his offer in written so that he could put it under discussion at a meeting of the central committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), added the report.

Earlier, Reuters had also reported that bin Salman had proposed $100bln to Abbas if he agreed with the recent US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel’s capital.

The US president last Wednesday defied global warnings, and said Washington formally recognizes Jerusalem al-Quds as the “capital” of Israel, and will begin the process of moving its embassy to the occupied city, breaking with decades of American policy despite widespread international opposition.

In anticipation of Trump’s move, 151 members of the UN General Assembly voted last week to adopt a rare resolution that denounced Israel as the “occupying power” of Jerusalem al-Quds, a city that is holy to Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike.

The city has seen heightened tensions since 2015, when the Israeli military introduced restrictions on the entry of Palestinian worshipers into the al-Aqsa Mosque — Islam’s third holiest site.

Over 300 Palestinians have lost their lives at the hands of Israeli soldiers ever since.

Israel lays claim to the entirety of al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital while Palestinians want its Eastern part as the capital of a future state for themselves.

Palestinian leaders have warned that the potential relocation would fuel strong reaction in the region and deliver a death blow to any prospect of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Trump’s move which overturns decades of US foreign policy has triggered a fresh wave of unrest in the Middle East.

*** Then going over to the Palestinian capitol of Ramallah, there was a poll taken. Can you guess the results?

The American step increases Abbas’ weakness, raises further suspicion concerning the role of regional powers, and increases calls for armed action:

More than 90% view the US recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel as a threat to Palestinian interests and the largest percentage demands a strong response that includes a return to an armed intifada. Moreover, the overwhelming majority does not trust Trump’s peace intentions, nor trust the major Arab allies of the US, and 70% demand Abbas’ resignation, and a majority demands the resignation of the reconciliation government if it does not immediately lift the PA sanctions imposed on the Gaza Strip.

7-10 December 2017

This poll has been conducted in cooperation with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Ramallah

These are the results of the latest poll conducted by the Palestinian Center

for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip

between 7-10 December 2017. The poll was conducted one day after the

announcement by President Trump that he is recognizing Jerusalem as the

capital of Israel and during a period in which limited clashes occurred

between Palestinian protesters and Israeli soldiers throughout the West Bank

and the Gaza Strip. By then, the Palestinian Authority has already publicly

condemned the US measure and announced cessation of peace-related contacts

with Washington. On the domestic front, reconciliation efforts continued to

produce slow progress and a meeting held in Cairo declared that elections

will take place before the end of 2018. This press release addresses these

issues and covers other matters such as general conditions in the

Palestinian territories and certain aspects of the peace process. Total size

of the sample is 1270 adults interviewed face to face in 127 randomly

selected locations. Margin of error is 3%.